14 _ :. J -'W<': A.UGUST 2. 8, 19 + >. \,.'\: ((_41 says nuts to the OPA. When he wants something he just whistles for it." ordinarily mean only about six ll10nths on the Island. Reform adll1inistrations , are notoriously overzealous, though, and nothing can be done about it. Best thing is to lay low until these bolts of lightning blow over. Ghost Story F OR reasons of its own, a local firll1 wanted to get in touch with the post- ll1aster at Knoxville, Tennessee. Ac- cordingly, a letter ,vas dispatched, ad- dressed simply "Postmaster, Knoxville, Tennessee." Back call1e the letter, in no time at all, bearing a rubber-stamped . " U 1 0 d K 0 11 " notatIon, nc aIll1e at nOXVI e. There ,vas another rubber-stall1ped message, too, asking for three cents ll10re postage. Tooker N o doubt about it, one of the heroes of the Normandie salvage job is Captain John I. Tooker, a civilian ell1- . . ployee of the firll1 of l\;lerritt-Chaplnan & Scott, the big salvage outfit which contracted to raise the Norll1andie, un- der the direction of the Navy, or, if you're a fiend for dotting your i's and crossing your t's, the U. S. S. Lafayette. Anyway, it's the biggest salvage job in history. Captain Tooker, when he ll1ade his estill1ate on the work, said it would take twenty ll10nths and cost six ll1illion dollars; now it looks as if he'll ll1ake a fool of hill1self by doing it in sixteen ll10nths at a cost of sOll1ething nearer four ll1illion. Not bad, not bad. Captain Tooker is a close-mouthed, sturdy fel- low in his late forties. He has been with Merritt-Chapman & Scott ever since he was eighteen, when he graduated froll1 high school in Staten Island and signed on as a deckhand. He is now, and has been for SOll1e years, an over-all boss of salvage projects, having worked his way up as a diver tender, diver, derrick captain, and captain of various salvage steall1ers. Captain Tooker's father was a salvage ll1an before him, and two of the Captain's sons are \\Torking as divers .on the Normandie job. A third is with the .i\.rll1Y, in Sicily. Captain Tooker's hon1e is on Staten Island, but he has figured out that in the last thirty years he has spent only about a quarter of the till1e at hOll1e. On the Norll1andie job, Captain Tooker calls hill1self the sal vage officer and the Navy calls him the superin- tendent; in any case, he's the working boss. "The Navy tells us to raise a boat and we go ahead and do it our own way," he told us the other day, in a hoarse, harbor-captain's voice. "There can't be two bosses on a job." He got in on the job very early. On the night of February 9, 1942, he was called to ier 88 to give expert advice on fighting the fire that was sweeping the ship. The next day, after she had settled on her side, he was asked to in- v.estigate the possibility of sal- vage. His report said it was pos- sible, though not without risk, since the hull was lying partly on a rock ledge and partly in mud and ll1ight be subject to all sorts of unpredictable stresses. After deliberation, the Navy said go ahead. Captain Tooker has stayed on the job all the till1e except for one trip to Block Island to give an opinion on the raising of a couple of sunken tankers. Usually he sleeps at the COll1ll10dore so as to be at hand if he's wanted. For a while aft- er they started to pUll1p the hull out, he slept aboard one of the tugs in the slip, if you can call twelve hours' sleep in seven days sleeping. The savings in till1e and ll10ney on the job were the result, so the captain says, of a twelve-hour, two-shifts-a-day schedule, an efficient school for training and breaking in divers right on the job, and the use of a new kind of patch for portholes. One of the Captain's colleagues advised us that he was being modest about the port- hole patch. Seems Captain Tooker in- vented it and that it's known, and ad- ll1ired, in salvage circles as the Tooker porthole patch. On a sunken hull, a porthole is just one more leak, and has to be sealed before the hull can be pUll1ped out; the Captain's patch, which we couldn't possibly describe, greatly speeds up the work. Captain Tooker gave the Navy his